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03 September 2010

That's a lot of blood...

Yesterday, I rode my bike home from work and was unpacking things. Yoko said to me, do you want to hear some bad news? And I was like, Well, no, but tell me anyway. And she was explaining to me that the kettle blew up earlier in the day, causing a small fire on the counter. As she was describing this, Mei toddled into the kitchen and fell into a wooden stair stool that we have in the kitchen.

It was one of those falls that looked like no problem, but suddenly Mei was really, really screaming and there was a ton of blood coming out of her mouth. A lot. You know how mouths are though. Anyway, Yoko picked her up and was trying to find where she had cut herself. When she finally got Mei to open her mouth and mopped up the blood, it looked like she had a pretty serious gash in her bottom lip.

I saw it and thought it looked bad, but knowing the mouth to be very quick to heal, I thought, Well, if it stops bleeding it will be fine. We got cotton on it, but Yoko was pretty worried about it and I, not knowing anything about this, thought, Okay, okay, let's go to the hospital.

So we got in the car and drove down to the hospital, but by the time we got there, Mei had stopped bleeding and actually fell asleep. This didn't seem like an emergency anymore, but luckily, at the hospital, they have a walk-in clinic, so we opted to go there and just have a GP look at it to be safe.

The walk-in clinic was full of teenagers, doing what exactly, I don't know. We signed in and like 10 minutes later the GP saw us. He said to Naomi, 'What's your name?' and she answered, 'Naomi' which sort of shocked me: she tends to be sort of nervous about speaking to strangers in English especially. Anyway, the GP was incredibly kind, took one look at the cut and was like, 'This is fine, she'll be fine.' And I said, Well, how do we know when to take her in or not, in the future? And he was like, It's up to you, it's no problem if you need something checked out.

So we left and went home and had dinner and it was over — another win for the NHS.